The Morning Briefing: Dems' #RESIST Strategy Might Just Be Turning Into Background Noise

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Friday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. (It's the final week of preparation for the whirlwind book tour, and the Sine Qua Non Sequitur is sampling funnel cakes at the Conchata Ferrell Appreciation Society's Winter Jubilee.)

Midterm election years can be all over the place, even in the calmest of times. We are most definitely not living in calm times here in the Year of Our Lord 2026. Looking at the behavior of the Trump Derangement Syndrome Democrats in the past ten years, we may never get back to them. As I wrote in a column earlier this week, "Democrats in the Trump era don't have policy ideas; they have public fits of pique that eventually become rallies and/or riots."

We have seen that "strategy" on full display to kick off this year. They're hoping that the seemingly endless anti-ICE protests will sufficiently demonize the agents, the Trump administration, and any politicians associated with him to propel the Democrats to victory next November. Seriously, the platform is pro-violent criminals and anti-law enforcement. That's what they're going with.

The world has gone crazy enough to think that the Democrats' lunatic approach might work. Some recent polling gives hope that it won't, which my friend Ed Morrissey wrote about over at HotAir:

Did Operation Metro Surge radicalize the electorate? Democrats certainly think so, even if polling on immigration has barely budged during and after the enforcement effort in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Rather than radicalize the Minnesota electorate, however, it may have just entrenched it more deeply.
A new NBC News poll report gives us a look at this dynamic, both within the Metro area of Minnesota and throughout the state. Rather than change minds, the entire weeks-long experience of robust immigration enforcement merely hardened positions

This backs up something that I began saying in the early days of the Biden administration and have mentioned quite frequently since President Trump returned to the White House — the people running the Democratic Party only do things that appeal to people who already agree with them. They take rabid Trump-haters and turn them into really, really rabid Trump-haters. All of that extra frothing probably won't help them win back any of the voters they lost in 2024. The voters who abandoned the Dems and voted for Trump knew where things were going with immigration enforcement.

It's still early, though. Maybe the hysteria will start working for them. Another thing I've been saying for years is that the most prominent voices in the Democratic Party aren't representative of all Democrats, they're just louder than everyone else. Dems are running the risk that the nonsensical furor will just be a lot of background noise that makes significant portions of the electorate tune out.

It's going to be a weird midterm year, though. Who knows, we might also be dealing with a hostile intergalactic invasion force by the fall.

Sticking with the subject of leftist outrage, Athena wrote a great piece yesterday that pondered what it might be like if the tantrums stopped for even a little while. Here's the intro to that:

We have these sad losers in our town — perhaps there are some in yours, too — who gather on the corner of a main street every Saturday to wave signs at passing cars for a few hours. The signs are adorned with spittle-flecked ravings about "kings" and "fascism" and so on, and someone usually has a Temu version of one of those President-Trump-as-a-baby balloons. And whenever we drive past these lost souls, we say to one another, “Imagine if they spent that energy on helping someone.”

It's a fun thought experiment that I highly recommend.

Alas, the Dems won't be abandoning the anger strategy anytime soon. Once they realize it's not working so far, it's only going to get worse. The go-to Dem answer to anything that doesn't work is to do more of it. They don't really do self-reflection when they fail, they just do blame assignment. It's always someone else's fault, which never leads to meaningful change.

Just more noise.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
02/19/26

DAILY GUIDANCE AND PRESS SCHEDULE FOR
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